Detectives Beyond Borders on stage in Bangkok

Christopher G. Moore was the inquisitor, Edwin van Doorn captured it on video, and I answered the questions, talking about international crime fiction as my shirt exuded a weird purply glow at Check Inn 99 in Bangkok. See the interview here.

Bangkok Noir interview with Peter Rozovsky

In Bangkok at the CheckInn99 on Sunday 15 November 2015 A special inaugural meet up of Bangkok Noir community was hosted by Christopher G. Moore and featured...

YOUTUBE.COM

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Detectives Beyond Borders on stage in Bangkok

Good fun at Sunday evening's noir fiction event at Check Inn 99 in Bangkok. I took no pictures of the evening's featured interview because I was its subject, talking about noir, crime fiction, Southeast Asia, noir and crime fiction in Southeast Asia, crime conventions, and other interesting topics. Many thanks to my interlocutor (and my host in Bangkok), Christopher G. Moore, and to the crowd of writers and publishers of crime fiction in this part of the world. You'll be reading about some of them in the coming weeks at Detectives Beyond Borders.

Check Inn 99 has quite a past. Suffice it to say that while my interview and its follow-up audience questions were a blast, they were not the most exciting happenings in this site's history.

Tom Vater

Soi Cowboy (Photos by Peter Rozovsky)

One nice touch: Among the attendees was Tom Vater, who writes crime fiction, is one of the folks behind the Hong Kong-based Crime Wave Press, and also wrote the guidebook I am using for the Cambodia legs of my trip.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Who, what, when, where, and wai: Detectives Beyond Borders to talk crime fiction in Bangkok

If you happen to be in Bangkok on Nov. 15, I'll be appearing at a pretty special event there that evening.  The handbill for the event (above/right), to be held at Check Inn 99, says Christopher G. Moore will interview me, but I'll probably ask more questions than I'll answer.

Sunday 15 Nov 6-9pm. A special inaugural meetup hosted by Christopher G. Moore featuring Peter Rozovsky the man behind Detective Beyond Borders. Peter is a well known Crime Fiction Critic whose blog is read internationally.
 
A relaxed and informal atmosphere to hear about trends in international Noir hardboiled mystery novels and how the community of writers in South East Asia fit into this genre. This will be a chance to join others who share similar interests and to meet locally based Crime and Fiction Authors, ask questions and otherwise enjoy yourselves. This will follow on from the popular Sunday afternoon Jazz Jam at Checkinn99. Entertainment after from Music of the Heart Band. More details on https://www.facebook.com/bangkoknoirauthors.

** Reserve a table now **

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If you're in the area, Check Inn 99 is at 97 Sukhumvit Road, right across from the Landmark Hotel. See you there.  

Read about the Bangkok Noir short story collection at http://www.heavenlakepress.com/books/BangkokNoir.htm

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is a different kind of kick

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), released as Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in the U.S., is the first Thai martial arts movie your humble blogkeeper has watched following a host of movies from Hong Kong and South Korea.

I mention this because the fighting style is so noticeably different: more compact, close-in, with much greater use of elbows and forearms. And, when the combatants fly through the air, as combatants always do in such movies,  they often do so horizontally, parallel to the ground.  A fighter is apt to move in close to his opponent, looking about to fly past him, before reaching almost backward to strike with an elbow.

Here's a primer on the muay Thai fighting style that helped me understand why this movie looks different from Chinese and Korean martial arts movies. The movie also is free, for the most part, of Hong Kong-style wire fu.

*

Many Asian martial arts movies send a hero from a rural village to a big city to get his job done. Here, young Ting (Tony Jaa), from a village in the northeastern region of Isan (ภาคอีสาน). volunteers to recover the head of the village's Buddha, stolen by a crime lord's henchman and taken to Bangkok.  The evil big-city trope is an old one, and I wonder when it became a part of Southeast Asian popular culture. In any case, this movie's first shots of Bangkok are among the most visually effective I can remember at conveying the frightening cacophony any big city, much less Bangkok, might seem to a newly arrived country boy.

*

The movie includes graphic scenes of the use and effects of yaba, which Wikipedia calls "a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine." At least, that's what Wiki says the drug in question is. The fighters here smoke or inject the drug, though the Wiki article on yaba says it is not commonly injected. In any case, yaba's effects are unpleasant, and the scenes in which it appears constitute a strong anti-message.

Finally, the Buddha. I have only a passing acquaintance with East and Southeast Asian art, but I always had the idea that Southeast Asian Buddhas tended to be more heavy-lidded than their Chinese counterparts, with facial attitudes of pleasantly relaxed, drowsy contemplation (right). The huge head of one such figure forms striking background to the movie's climactic fight.

OK, enough with the sociological and aesthetic blather. I hope I've convinced you that there is much of interest in Ong-Bak even if your movie viewing does not normally include heroes who face down crowds of stick- and knife-wielding thugs and somersault over their heads while kicking the crap out of them. Recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Timothy Hallinan and anger as a motivator in crime fiction

Timothy Hallinan's protagonist Poke Rafferty is a 1960s sitcom father in 2000s Bangkok. We virtually never see him working at his job (he's a travel writer), for example, and we get much about the joys and challenges of life with his unconventional family (He's Asian-Irish, his wife is a Thai ex-bar girl, and their daughter is a former street kid.)

Unlike Fred MacMurray, though, Poke gets angry, and when the darker emotions take over, he becomes an action hero. Here are two short examples from The Queen of Patpong (2010) of Poke working his way up to the metamorphosis:

"Rafferty has dried blood on his hand from when he pushed himself up from the carpet beside Mrs. Pongsiri. The sight of it makes him dizzy with anger."

and

“`You’re nervous,' Arthit says. `You don’t usually natter.' “`It’s not nerves, it’s plain old hatred.'”

Further, circumstantial evidence suggests that anger motivates not just the character, but his creator as well. In 2008, Hallinan told Detectives Beyond Borders that

"The dreadful child abuse – more pornography than prostitution – in A Nail Through the Heart was based on a real guy, a German monster who actually lived in Bangkok and shot there the pictures described in the book. I don't know whether he's dead (although I fervently hope he is), but the pictures seem to have stopped coming."

What other crime protagonists and crime writers are motivated by anger, fury, rage, or hatred? (I'll nominate Andrew Vachss and his several protagonists, including Burke.) How do you feel about anger as a motivator?

(Read both parts of Detectives Beyond Borders' 2008 interview with Tim Hallinan.)

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Tim Hallinan will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland next month. The panel is called "Murder is Everywhere," and it happens Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. See you there! Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win Colin Cotterill's new book

Colin Cotterill, author of the Dr. Siri  Paiboun mysteries about the aging chief (and only) coroner in post-revoltionary Laos and his odd cast of helpers, has begun a new series about an eccentric family in Thailand.

The series opens thus: "Old Mel hired one of Da's nephews — the slow-witted one with the dent in his forehead — to sink a well in his back acre."

That's typical Cotterill in form and substance, and if you shudder a politically correct shudder at slow-witted, don't. Cotterill is the most human, compassionate and generous of authors in his depictions of the elderly and of a character with Down syndrome in his Dr. Siri books. I'm confident he won't make cruel or gratuitous fun of anyone here.

But why trust me? One lucky reader in the U.S. only can win a copy of the book, Killed at the Whim of a Hat, courtesy of the good people at Minotaur Books, and judge for her or himself.  All you have to do is answer the following skill-testing question.

Cotterill's novel The Coroner's Lunch tells us a bit about Dr. Siri's reading habits:

"During his stay in Paris decades before, he'd taken his delight in the weekly serializations of one Monsieur Sim in the l'Oeuvre newspaper ... Siri had been able to solve most of the mysteries long before the inspector had a handle on them."

Who is Monsieur Sim?

===============

   Liz from Maryland knew that "Monsieur Sim" was Georges Simenon. He used the alias early in his career, and Liz wins a copy of Killed at the Whim of a Hat. Congratulations, and thanks to Liz and to Minotaur Books. 

===============

 (Read Colin Cotterill's blog for information about his books and samples of his cartoons. Watch an entertaining interview with Cotterill here, and read my previous posts about Cotterill; just click the link, and scroll down,)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

From the city of angels: Bangkok Noir

If you happen to be near the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand on April 2, why not drop in on a book signing for Bangkok Noir from Heaven Lake Press?

The collection's twelve short stories include contributions from John Burdett, Colin Cotterill, Timothy Hallinan, Pico Iyer and others, Thai and non-Thai. (See the complete contents here.)

Here are some excerpts from Christopher G. Moore's introduction:

"The potential list of subjects is long, but the stories in this collection will give more than a few insights into the Thai noir world. The idea of the national sport, Muay Thai — a combination of ballet, boxing, kicking and kneeing — is pure noir." [Take note, Christa Faust.]

"If noir is looking a little tired in the West, in Thailand it has all the energy and courage of a kid from upcountry who thinks the Khmer tattoos on his body will stop bullets."

"[A] stab in the heart of noir darkness suggests that while many Thais embrace the materialistic aspects of modern Western life, the spiritual and sacred side draws upon Thai myths, legends and customs, and remains resistant to the imported mythology of the West. In the tension between the show of gold, the Benz, the foreign trips and designer clothes, and the underlying belief system creates an atmosphere that stretches people between opposite poles."

======

Here's my interview with Timothy Hallinan. Christopher G. Moore needs no introduction, but I wrote one anyway, for his most recent book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Detectives Beyond Borders in a book, Part II

I like The Cultural Detective: Reflections on the Writing Life in Thailand by Christopher G. Moore for its street-level yet outsider's view of Bangkok, for its unsentimental takes on Moore's craft and country, and for the contents and titles of its essays. (My favorite is “The Culture of Complaining.”)

I'm especially attached to this item from its table of contents, though:

Introduction by Peter Rozovsky ... vii

Moore, author of the Vincent Calvino crime novels about an American P.I. in Bangkok, probing commentator on and questioner of his adopted country, and member of one of my panels at Bouchercon 2010, has given me my second appearance between covers, following on Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction.

Here's a recent bit of Moore's writing to give you an idea of what you'll find in the book.

Here's a bit of my introduction:

“I once was a prisoner in the cult of authenticity, skeptical of crime writers who wrote about countries other than their own. (Tourist that I am, I sneered at tourists.)

“Christopher G. Moore plugs that attitude between the eyes early in the collection of essays you’re about to read. `There is a tradition of pundits saying foreigners can’t understand how Thais think,' he tells us. `That is in itself an interesting theory of mind, suggesting that non-Thais are basically rendered autistic when it comes to understanding how Thais form intentions and the true nature of their beliefs.'

“That’s a neat trick, isn’t it? With a few taps on his keyboard, Moore demonstrates that authenticity snobs of the kind I once was are nothing more than upscale propagandists for the old belief that Orientals are inscrutable.”

Here's some info on ordering the book. Stay tuned for your chance to win a copy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Two crime writers on corruption and cultural misunderstanding

Christopher G. Moore, crime novelist and student of cultural differences between East and West, wrote once that in Thailand

"The gift giving which flows as a tangible sign of respect is the slippery slope that descends easily into corruption. It becomes the basis of patronage and the client/patron relationship."

Elsewhere he has enumerated the right to ignore traffic laws as an unearned privilege that accrues to the Thai elite.

I expect that he'd approve of the following passage from Charlotte Jay's The Yellow Turban in which a character looks back at his arrival in Pakistan:

"If the doctor had offered me his bribe a month or so later after I had contracted a few of the local money-getting habits, I might not have been so overwhelmed with indignation. But I was new to the land. I obeyed the signals of traffic police without thinking and was shocked when Iqubal had slipped past them. I queued up at the post office for stamps, instead of thrusting my way through the grubby peons gathered round the window and slamming my money on the desk, as I was to do a month later. And the taking of a bribe was neatly labelled in my mind as antisocial—even criminal perhaps."

and this:

"Naturally he had heard of the corruption of the East but he had, I think, believed that this was largely a charge manufactured by certain Europeans to explain their own failure to understand the Oriental, and that with the departure of the British such evils would simply and automatically cease. And he was too honest and naïve to stand up to the collapse of his ideals."

Jay, an Australian, lived in Thailand when the novel, published in 1955, was released, according to a blurb for my edition. I'd guess from the two passages I cite here that she, like Moore, thought with considerable insight about what happens when Westerners try — and, in the second case, fail — to adjust to Eastern notions of conduct and ethics.

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Read more from Christopher G. Moore on East, West and the places where they meet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Spirit houses and other houses in crime fiction

Christopher G. Moore's crime fiction is not generally suffused with nostalgia, but Spirit House, his first novel featuring P.I. Vincent Calvino, does include a kind of elegy for Bangkok's traditional buildings:

"The main house was inside a high-walled compound. ... It looked like the kind of place you could paint with brown, yellow, and black. This was old-style Bangkok before the property developers tore down the traditional Thai houses with sweeping verandas and painted wood shutters. Behind the white wood-framed main house Isan workers in bamboo hats and scarves wrapped around their faces dotted a crazy-quilt of makeshift scaffolding stuck to the side of a twenty-story construction site. More real-estate developers, like the Finns who owned his office building, were looking to make a killing units to rich foreign buyers from Japan and Korea."

I once posted a comment about the evocative descriptions of Shanghai's shikumen houses in Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine and the kholis of Bombay in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.

What are your favorite descriptions of homes, houses or other buildings in crime fiction?

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(Christoper G. Moore will be part of my "Stamp of Death" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crime fiction and culture, east and west

I can't find the citation, but I think it was Colin Watson who suggested that the police procedural was late in establishing itself in England for class reasons: Police came from the working classes, and social barriers would simply not have allowed such figures to pry into noblemen's affairs or let noblemen take such probing seriously.

I thought of this when I read a passage in Christopher G. Moore's 2007 novel The Risk of Infidelity Index. A lawyer has been found dead during Bangkok's annual Oxford-Cambridge dinner, a gathering of some of Thailand's most powerful people, and one of his junior colleagues was the last person to see him alive (though he had nothing to do with the death). This puts the young lawyer in an exceedingly difficult position, the firm's head tells him, since the idea that the dinner's truly powerful guests could face police scrutiny is absurd:

"What better place to kill someone? With two hundred of the top movers and shakers of Thai society nearby. If you wanted to kill someone, wouldn't that be a perfect place? Where would the police start? Questioning people from influential families, people with titles, people who work at the highest levels of government, banking and commerce? Where would you start?"

Moore has written elsewhere about Thailand's deference culture, arguing that Thailand has traditionally been characterized by unearned deference for descendants of the right families. Sounds British, doesn't it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sitting back and watching the action

A little more than three chapters into Christopher G. Moore's Paying Back Jack, two hit men have been incinerated during a botched assassination, a woman has plunged to her death from a hotel window, and two mysterious military figures have arrived in town.

Yet even amid the bursts of action, the pace is relaxed, the dominant mood that of a slow feeling-out, an openness to Bangkok's strange and wonderful sights. Some amusing and telling lines help:

"A couple of yings dressed like Japanese geisha called out to him. They liked his jacket. They smelled money.

"`I'm not Japanese. I can't go inside,' he called back in Thai.

"`No problem. You not come in. We go out. Sure.'"

and

"He'd packed Graham Greene's The Quiet American -- on the basis that he'd never met such an American -- and George Orwell's Burmese Days."

and

"There were other private security contractors like them mixing in, looking for new recruits, talking about the situation in Baghdad and the bad old days of Desert Storm. That storm had left the desert and pretty much spread everywhere. That much everyone agreed on as they bought each other rounds of drinks and waited to crank up one more Cobra Gold exercise."

That last passage reminds me of a remark in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's The Man of My Life about the "theology of security." What other crime fiction alludes or refers explicitly to our post-New World Order, post-9/11 worlds?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How Christopher G.Moore crosses borders

Christopher G. Moore calls his P.I. protagonist, Vincent Calvino, "a cultural detective. He sifts through the evidence in a way that makes sense of the location and people living in Southeast Asia."

Moore lived, worked or studied in Canada, England, the United States and Japan before winding up in Bangkok. He writes of seeing Thailand come out its isolation, of people everywhere "inching closer to a common center."

Calvino is a former lawyer who similarly wound up in Bangkok. I'm not sure he has arrived at that center yet, but it's fun to watch his trip. Here's a bit from the opening chapter of the tenth Calvino novel, Paying Back Jack:

"They'd suggested that he try looking at things as if they were fresh, new, and of another time and place.

"I've just arrived, and this is the first street in Asia I've ever seen. A smile crossed Calvino's face as he moved down the soi. Each step was a foot deeper into the freak show, starting with the huge banyan tree. Its large, twisted trunk wrapped with dozens of thin, colored nylon scarves, the tree had long, stringy veins that hung like gnarled tentacles over the soi. A dwarf stood on the broken sidewalk in front of a bar, dressed in a vest, a white shirt, and a bow tie. Holding up a sign for happy hour beer, he tagged along after each passing tourist for a few steps. Then, exhausted, he'd stop and retrace his steps to the bar and wait to strike again. `Come inside!' he shouted. `Many pretty girls!' The dwarf was right."

There are no twisted banyan trees in Philadelphia, and if the city has dwarf touts, I've missed them as well. But I'd call Calvino's approach a nice way of opening one's eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a new place -- or to an old one whose initial excitement has begun to pall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A new blog about international crime fiction from folks who write the stuff

It's International Crime Authors Reality Check, a cooperative effort from Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill, Matt Beynon Reese and Barbara Nadel, each of whom plans one post a week.

The opening lineup includes How the Devil Lost its Vagina from Cotterill, Quick, woman, go and get the Koran! from Rees, The Elements of Crime Fiction in Foreign Settings from Moore, and a modest greeting from Nadel.

The site also includes short biographies, information about the authors' books, and news links. I've written about three of the authors here on Detectives Beyond Borders, most recently about Cotterill's Curse of the Pogo Stick last week, and I'll look forward to adding Nadel to the list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bits of humor in Breathing Water

I'll start from the end, with Timothy Hallinan's author's note: "Those of you who find it difficult to believe in the Bangkok that's depicted here should know that millions of people feel exactly the same way about the real-life city."

And this, about a quarter of the way into the book:

"You were–" He turns to Dr. Ravi and says, in English, "I don't know the Thai. Tell him he was appalling."

"I think ... " Dr. Ravi swallows. "I think he's already gotten that message."

"A bodyguard can level with him and you can't? What kind of amanuensis are you?"

"I'm not an amanuensis. I'm his media director."

"Goddamn it," Pan says in heavily accented English. "Speak Thai. Or translate."

Or this:

"The activity had the unfortunate effect of making him look even more like a monkey, one who is on the verge of inventing a tool but probably won't."

That sentence could do without "had the unfortunate effect of," and for all I know, it may be changed before the book goes to press. But this matters little because the passage is a gorgeous description of a big, dumb, powerful thug. And that matters. The big, dumb, powerful thug is a crime-fiction staple, and Hallinan makes it fresh. Breathing Water is a pleasure to read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thai anxiety: Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water

I didn't set out to do so, but I've read a number of crime novels recently that have crime writers as protagonists. Naturally this has had me looking for self-reference, and I found it, whether the authors, Chris Ewan and L.C. Tyler, intended the self-reference or not.

Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty is a different kind of author – a travel writer based in Bangkok – and Breathing Water has him serving rather more demanding editors: a shady, ultra-rich Thai patron of the tarts who grants Rafferty the right to write his life story as the result of a lost poker game, on the one hand, and on the other, competing groups of shady, ultra-rich Thais who have their own ideas of the tack the book should take and who threaten Rafferty and his wife and child if the book does not turn out right – or if he writes it at all.

That's more pressure than authors usually get, and it gives Rafferty occasion for reflections that may strike a chord with writers whether or not they echo Hallinan's own experience:

"[Rafferty] figures he'll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He's long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one."

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Breathing Water is the third Rafferty novel. Two-thirds of the way in, it's a thriller that's hard to put down. Hallinan knows how to create suspense without resorting to obvious cliffhangers, and he knows how to maintain dual story strands and keep a reader wondering how each will turn out as well as how the two will come together. It says here that he also creates a convincing picture of Thai life among the obscenely rich and the desperately poor and that he does a neat job of injecting narrative movement into a purely expository scene – in this case, a dialogue on some realities of Thai politics.

I'll probably have more to say soon, perhaps about Hallinan's white-knight hero and brief, grim, humorous chapter titles. For background on Poke Rafferty and his creator, read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Timothy Hallinan here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

An interview with Timothy Hallinan, Part II

In part two of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, author Timothy Hallinan talks about the persistence of the Khmer Rouge, Western crime writers in Southeast Asia, and his protagonist's interesting career.

(Read part one of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)
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The afterlife of the Khmer Rouge figures in A Nail Through the Heart. Have Khmer Rouge figures in fact slipped into civilian lives in Southeast Asia outside Cambodia?

Absolutely. Madame Wing actually lives in Bangkok, under a different name, of course. The Khmer Rouge stole hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the murderers simply stayed in Cambodia. Some of them are high up in the Cambodian government, which is the main reason it's taken so long to bring anyone to trial. But some of them slipped away, and she's one of them.

Poke Rafferty is settling down from a life of writing the kinds of travel guides I'd have liked to read. Why did you choose this as a former career for your protagonist? And do such travel guides exist?

You know, at the time I started to write the series, I was sure they did, but now I don't think so. Lonely Planet kind of started out as alternative guides, but now, as we all know, they're publishing guide books by people who have never visited the countries they're writing about. I've thought several times of writing them myself, under Poke's name, just to get people confused. But it would require too much energy. The great thing about fiction is that you can just make it up.

Poke came to me on New Year's 1998, when I walked Bangkok from about 10 P.M. to 9 A.M. I went everywhere, but mostly off the main drags. And Poke came into my mind: a travel writer who writes about the places that are beyond the margins of the well-worn tourist paths. And I immediately realized that this character had already written a couple of books, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines and Looking for Trouble in Indonesia, and that he'd written them from an external, fairly superficial perspective. But when he got to Thailand, the place blindsided him, as it did me, and he suddenly found himself in a culture to which he actually wanted to belong.

But the important thing, from a writing standpoint, was that he didn't belong, and because he didn't belong, he didn't have to understand everything; he could make mistakes about the people and the lives they live. And he spoke only elementary Thai. Those things were very liberating for me. I'd been nervous about writing about Thailand because I knew there was so much I didn't understand. Suddenly, I didn't have to be the guy who could write the Wikipedia entry on Thailand. My character was just another clown trying to find his way in. He was going to get things wrong from time to time.

And I figured writing these guides would give him an interesting skill set, street smarts that would come in handy.

What kind of a community, if any, is there among Western crime writers who live at least part time in Southeast Asia and set their work there, people like you, Colin Cotterill and Christopher G. Moore?

I know Chris Moore and like him very much. I've never met Colin, although I want to because I love his books. Writers tend to be sort of solitary, but Chris and I grin at each other and have lunch from time to time, when we pry our fingers from the keyboards and emerge into the sunlight.

What are the crime-fiction-reading habits of Thai readers? Does Thailand have a native crime-fiction tradition? How much translated crime fiction is available there?

Not much tradition that I know of, although there are lots of thriller films set in Bangkok. Danny and Oxide Pang (are those great names, or what?) have directed a couple.

Poke is of mixed Asian and European descent. Why did you choose to give him this ethnic background? What does this bring to his character?

I always wanted to be part Asian, or even all-Asian. I think Asian people, when they look cool, look cooler than anybody. If I could start over, I'd like to be Korean or Thai, and really killer-looking, as well as somewhat taller than the norm.

I also thought it might be handy if Poke could, on occasion, blend in with the local population, or at least not stand out to the extent he would if he were, say, Norwegian. I used that in the first book I wrote about him, which I never showed to my agent (I wrote it just to get my feet wet in Poke's world) and it came in very handy in that story because he had to disappear. And here I am writing the third, and guess what? He has to disappear. So those Asian genes are going to be very helpful.

(Read part one of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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An interview with Timothy Hallinan, Part I

Readers of book-jacket biographies know that crime writers tend to have (or to be given) colorful job histories. Often these include bartender, bouncer, teacher, sailor, deck hand, skip tracer or private investigator. Timothy Hallinan's résumé includes none of these, but his background does include a career in television and an embryonic association with one of the most successful pop bands of the 1970s. He also lives part time in Thailand and sets his novels there, as good a credential for adventure as a crime writer can have.

Hallinan has published two books about Poke Rafferty. This protagonist is the author of travel guides called Looking for Trouble in ... but is himself trying to stay out of trouble by settling down in Bangkok with his bar-girl-turned-businesswoman lover. His tenuous success with this remarkable woman is a running motif and a delight of the novels. When it comes to staying out of trouble, however, he fails dismally.

Hallinan's Poke Rafferty books are A Nail Through the Heart and the new Fourth Watcher. He also wrote six novels about Los Angeles P.I. Simeon Grist. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Timothy Hallinan discusses the delights and terrors of Thailand as well as the road that led him there. He also delivers a good, solid kick in the pants to a supposedly respectable and authoritative American television network.

(Read part two of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)
================================

Forgive this question because I am just old enough to remember when Bread was a pervasive AM radio presence, but what was your association with the group, and how did you get from that to writing crime fiction?

I was in a band called The Pleasure Fair with Robb Royer, who went on to found Bread with David Gates and Jimmy Griffin. We made an album on Uni records, which at the time was Universal Studios' music arm. The LP went nowhere, but it was produced by David Gates, and he and Robb and Jimmy later got together, and the rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately, I'm not on those chapters of the history book, or I'd be a lot richer.

So I took a day job which evolved into a very nice career in television, but was always writing in my spare time. I had about three partial novels (I was at that stage where you're “writing at” novels rather than writing novels), and my house in the Hollywood Hills burned down. I had backups of everything, but they were all in the house. I underwent one of those realizations: If I'd finished any of those books, it would have been somewhere else – in print, on some agent's desk, somewhere. So I went to Thailand and started to rewrite the book I remembered best. I finished it in eight weeks, and it sold immediately, and suddenly there I was with a three-book contract. The key was finishing. That's why in the Writer's Resources of my Web site, http://www.timothyhallinan.com/, the keynote quotation is Thomas Farber's line, “A writer is someone who finishes.”

How did you wind up in Thailand?

Totally by accident. I was in Japan with the first Western symphony orchestra ever to tour there (I was working on a PBS series about the tour), and I had decided to go to some hot springs when the job was over and sit up to my nose in hot water, reading The Tale of Genji. A bunch of the guys in the string section thought that sounded great and decided to go along. I'd been sitting next to them for weeks and was less than enthusiastic about continuing to sit next to them while on vacation, so I called my travel agent and asked her to book me on a flight to anywhere in Asia where I didn't need a visa. Forty-eight hours later, I got off the plane in Bangkok wearing a down jacket and a scarf (it was February, and cold as hell in Japan), and it was 97 degrees. The immigration guys were falling off their chairs laughing at me. And I fell in love with the place – the contrasts, the energy, the smiles of the people. I took an apartment within a week.

The Poke Rafferty books are not your only novels. Could you talk a bit about your other crime writing?

I wrote six novels set in the other town I know best, which is Los Angeles, featuring an overeducated private eye called Simeon Grist – four graduate degrees and no actual idea about how to make a living. A lot like me. Anyway, the Simeon books got the reviews writers dream of and the sales they have nightmares about. Every book was hailed as my breakthrough by somebody important (this was when newspapers still thought people wanted to read about books). But lightning never struck. So after we put Simeon out to graze, I took a few years off and just concentrated on making money so I could write full-time. And now I can.

What attracted you to Bangkok, Thailand and Southeast Asia in general as settings for crime stories?

Well, I love the whole Southeast Asian thing: everything from the terrible traffic to the temple in the jungle by the sea. Any place that's had continuous and somewhat isolated civilization for, say, 1,200 years, that suddenly collides with the overwhelmingly Western influences of the 21st century is going to be interesting. This is nowhere truer than it is in Thailand and Cambodia, both of which have gone through tremendous societal changes in the past 30 years or so – although there's nothing in recent Thai history to compare with the Cambodian tragedy of the Khmer Rouge.

What I like best is the fact that Westerners, including my protagonist, Poke Rafferty, never really get inside. They're made to feel special and welcome, and after a while they think of themselves as being part of everything, but they're not, and they never will be – the society might as well be a department-store window display with the foreigners on the other side of the glass. They will never get through that pane of glass. And that's the situation Poke's in – he's in love with the culture, he's in love with two Thai females, his wife, Rose, and his adopted daughter, Miaow, and those relationships aren't going to work out in the long run unless he becomes more Thai. The same is true of the scrapes he gets into. Unless he understands the society better, he could wind up dead. It's kind of an interesting situation.

And then, I also get to deduct all my expenses there from my tax return if I write books that are set there.

Child prostitution figures in the Rafferty novels. How widespread is the phenomenon in Thailand, and is it more widespread there than elsewhere in Southeast Asia? If so, why? Is undue suspicion ever cast on Westerners living in Thailand because of it?

The dreadful child abuse – more pornography than prostitution – in A Nail Through the Heart was based on a real guy, a German monster who actually lived in Bangkok and shot there the pictures described in the book. I don't know whether he's dead (although I fervently hope he is), but the pictures seem to have stopped coming.

I think child prostitution exists anywhere you have a very large, very poor lower class. In Thailand and Cambodia, where it used to be quite prevalent, it's either pretty much disappeared now, or it's moved way, way underground. I live in both countries, and there are still lots of street kids, so my guess would be that there's still some child prostitution, but not with pimps and child brothels and all the rest of the institutionalization of the trade that used to exist. And yes, I think Western men who live there are regarded with a certain amount of unfriendly speculation.

Part of the problem is that American television news is so unprincipled. Every year they run the same terrible footage of child prostitutes, taken in Phnom Penh in 2002, as the center of a piece on CNN or MSNBC with a title like House of Shame or something equally maudlin. The fact is, they haven't spotted anything new since 2002, but why let that get in the way of a sure-fire teaser line like "Child Sex at Eleven"?

I was in Phnom Penh the last time Anderson Cooper was there, and he shot his set-up in front of the brothels of Tuol Kork, where most of the women could be charitably described as motherly. All the lighted doors were out of focus behind him. The shadows moving around could have been adults, or children, or Komodo dragons for all anyone could tell. Several bars where freelancers go to meet tourists refused to allow any woman under 5 feet, 4 inches into the bar while CNN was in town because they were terrified of some shot taken from behind of a big guy and a small woman. The most disgusting thing of all was that the whole time CNN was in Phnom Penh, the tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge leaders – who killed two million people – was finally about to get underway, the first time any of these bloodsuckers had ever been brought to account. And CNN never reported a single word about it. Not sexy enough; "Murderers of Millions Brought to Justice" is nowhere near as good as "Child Sex at Eleven."

(Read part two of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The beauty of banality

A delightful passage in Timothy Hallinan's Thailand-set novel A Nail Through the Heart shows refreshing modesty about exotic travel:

"Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafé shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world's best coffee, replacing taste with convenience."

The novel's protagonist, Poke Rafferty, does not much like the change, seeing in it "a clear line of demarcation between the relatively leisurely pace of life in traditional Thailand and the hurry-up influence of the West." Does this make Hallinan an author from abroad taking an easy pot shot?

Not quite. Here's the rest of the passage:

"But Rose [who is Thai] grew up with Nescafé. She adores it, hot, tepid or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. ... [Rafferty] takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It's an interesting drink if you don't insist that it's coffee."

The thought is amusing, the observation affectionate. It leads me to suspect that Hallinan, an American who lives part time in Southeast Asia, has an eye for real life among his hosts and an openness to experience that goes beyond the exotic. He is a traveller, to cite a useful distinction that a teacher of mine once made, and not just a tourist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Timely travel tales and a question about amateur sleuths

Hot on the heels on the Lonely Planet/Thomas Kohnstamm travel-guide scandal, and through the good offices of William Morrow, come Timothy Hallinan's first two novels about Poke Rafferty, a rough-travel writer forced by circumstances to turn investigator.

Jacket copy on the first book, A Nail Through the Heart, says Rafferty's "Looking for Trouble series is for travelers obsessed with the unusual: how to beat official foreign-exchange rates; how to spot fake amber or counterfeit money; how much to bribe a cop; how to identify a transvestite before it's too late."

I don't know if this novel or its follow-up, The Fourth Watcher, deal with issues raised in the Kohnstamm dust-up — comps, freebies, accounts based on visits that never happened — but that lighthearted blurb leads me to believe in the possibility. And the protagonist's situation — he's not just Bangkok-based, but he writes for foreigners seeking thrills — leaves ample room for satire, not to mention intrigue and thrills. The novel's short prologue, though, is a somber invocation of a tsunami as seen through a jerky TV camera.

Rafferty's job expands my list of interesting amateur-sleuth professions, a subject about which I've posted here and here. And so, readers, two questions: Have you met any other travel-writer sleuths in your reading? How about other odd and interesting occupations for your favorite amateur detectives?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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